Animal Farm: A Fairy Story

Name: Animal Farm: A Fairy Story
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144 pages2 hours

Summary

George Orwell’s famous satire of the Soviet Union, in which “all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”

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Publisher: Houghton Mifflin HarcourtReleased: Jul 1, 2009ISBN: 9780547370224Format: book

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Animal Farm - George Orwell

Footnotes

Introduction

Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service. The family moved to England in 1907 and in 1917 Orwell entered Eton, where he contributed regularly to the various college magazines. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). Several years of poverty followed. He lived in Paris for two years before returning to England, where he worked successively as a private tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals. Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933. In 1936 he was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a powerful description of the poverty he saw there. At the end of 1936 Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was wounded. Homage to Catalonia is his account of the civil war. He was admitted to a sanatorium in 1938 and from then on was never fully fit. He spent six months in Morocco and there wrote Coming Up for Air. During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943. As literary editor of Tribune he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary, and he also wrote for the Observer and later for the Manchester Evening News. His unique political allegory, Animal Farm, was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him world-wide fame.

George Orwell died in London in January 1950. A few days before, Desmond MacCarthy had sent him a message of greeting in which he wrote: ‘You have made an indelible mark on English literature... you are among the few memorable writers of your generation.’

Peter Davison is Research Professor of English at De Montfort University, Leicester. He was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1926 and studied for a London External BA (1954) by correspondence course. He edited an Elizabethan text for a London MA (1957) and then taught at Sydney University, where he gained a Ph.D. He was awarded a D.Litt. and an Hon. D. Arts by De Montfort University in 1999. He has written and edited fifteen books as well as the Facsimile Edition of the manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four and the twenty volumes of Orwell’s Complete Works (with Ian Angus and Sheila Davison). He is a Past-President of the Bibliographical Society, whose journal he edited for twelve years. He was made an OBE in 1999 for services to literature.

First Mariner edition 2009

1987

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

First published by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1945

This edition first published by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd in the Complete Works of George Orwell series 1987

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

ISBN 978-0-15-107255-2

eISBN 978-0-547-37022-4

v3.0613

A Note on the Text

Animal Farm was published in England on 17 August 1945 and one year later in the United States. Until Animal Farm the total print-run of Orwell’s nine books (including Inside the Whale and The Lion and the Unicorn) in Britain and America amounted to some 195,500 copies. Of these, 47,079 were of The Road to Wigan Pier and 115,000 were Penguin editions of Down and Out in Paris and London (1940) and Burmese Days (1944). Shortage of paper after the World War II restricted the number of copies of Animal Farm printed in Britain, but 25,500 copies had been issued by the time Orwell died in January 1950, and 590,000 in America. These figures give quantitative support to the enormous and immediate success of Animal Farm, and they are backed up by the range and variety of the translations made during the few remaining years of Orwell’s life—translations into all the principal European languages, as well as Persian, Telugu, Icelandic, and Ukrainian. But what genre of book was being offered to these different publics? The most important textual variant of Animal Farm affects its title-page. Orwell called his book, Animal Farm: A Fairy Story. This is the description given in all editions published by Secker & Warburg and Penguin Books but the Americans dropped A Fairy Story from the outset. (One of the many publishers who declined to publish Animal Farm in Britain and America did so because he considered there was no market for children’s books.) Only in Telugu, of all the translations made in Orwell’s lifetime, was A Fairy Story retained. In other translations the subtitle was dropped or became A Satire, A Contemporary Satire, or was described as an adventure or tale. This is not the place to discuss the significance of the original subtitle, except, perhaps, to point out that it stems from Orwell’s abiding fascination for fairy stories and the like encountered during early childhood, in his work as a teacher, and his time at the BBC.

Typescripts of two of Orwell’s books have survived—Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four—in addition to an author’s proof for Animal Farm. The number of textual variants is relatively few. When the text was prepared for the English printer, variations in capitalisation and spelling were smoothed out (so that Orwell’s ‘hay field’, ‘hay-field’ and ‘hayfield’ all became one word) and, on average, the punctuation was changed twice on each page. For this edition Orwell’s punctuation has been preferred and what may be a subtle shift from ‘seven commandments’ (page 15, line 17) to ‘Seven Commandments’ (e.g., page 21, lines 2–3), after they have become sacrosanct, is restored. In 1945 the pigeons were not permitted to drop dung on Mr Jones and his men (page 26, line 23), but were required, obscurely, to ‘mute’ upon them instead to avoid offending readers’ susceptibilities.

Of the two most interesting textual characteristics of Animal Farm, apart from its genre subtitle, one is a change made just in time for the first edition and the other is an afterthought that cannot properly be incorporated.

In March 1945 Orwell was in Paris working as a war correspondent for the Observer and the Manchester Evening News. He there met Joseph Czapski, a survivor of Soviet concentration camps and the Katyn Massacre. Despite the latter’s experiences and his opposition to the Soviet regime, he explained to Orwell (as Orwell wrote to Arthur Koestler) that ‘it was the character of Stalin... the greatness of Stalin’ that saved Russia from the German invasion. ‘He stayed in Moscow when the Germans nearly took it, and his courage was what saved the situation.’ In Animal Farm, although parallels to historical personages are not exact, Stalin is certainly represented by Napoleon.¹ A few days after meeting Czapski, Orwell wrote to his publishers asking for the text to be changed in chapter VIII (in this edition page 69, line 22). Instead of ‘all the animals, including Napoleon,’ falling to the ground, he wanted, ‘all the animals, except Napoleon’. This alteration, he wrote, ‘would be fair to Stalin, as he did stay in Moscow during the German advance’.

At the end of 1946, Orwell prepared an adaptation of Animal Farm for the BBC Third Programme. On 2 December Dwight Macdonald, editor of the American journal Politics, and a friend of Orwell’s, wrote saying he assumed Animal Farm applied only to Russia and that Orwell was not making any larger statement about the philosophy of revolution. Orwell replied that though Animal Farm was ‘primarily a satire on the Russian Revolution’ it was intended to have a wider application. That kind of revolution, which he defined as ‘violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people’, could only lead to a change of masters. He went on: ‘I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job. The turning-point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves’, and he referred to the naval mutiny at Kronstadt in 1921 when the sailors supported those striking in Leningrad against the Soviet regime. Realising that the turning-point in the novel was not clear enough, he added these lines of dialogue to the radio adaptation he was just then completing:

CLOVER: Do you think that is quite fair to appropriate the apples?

MOLLY: What, keep all the apples for themselves?

MURIEL: Aren’t we to have any?

COW: I thought they were going to be shared out equally.

The significance of these lines was lost on the BBC producer, Rayner Heppenstall, who cut them out. As Orwell did not revise Animal Farm, it is beyond an editor’s remit to add them to the book, but they do highlight what Orwell told Geoffrey Gorer was the ‘key passage’ of Animal Farm.

PETER DAVISON

Albany, London

Chapter 1

Mr Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes. With the ring of light from his lantern dancing from side to side he lurched across the yard, kicked off his boots at the back door, drew himself a last glass of beer from the barrel in the scullery, and made his way up to bed, where Mrs Jones was already snoring.

As soon as the light in the bedroom went out there was a stirring and a fluttering all through the farm buildings. Word had gone round during the day that old Major, the prize Middle White boar, had had a strange dream on the previous night and wished to communicate it to the other animals. It had been agreed that they should all meet in the big barn as soon as Mr Jones was safely out of the way. Old Major (so he was always called, though the name under which he had been exhibited was Willingdon Beauty) was so highly regarded on the farm that everyone was quite ready to lose an hour’s sleep in order to hear what he had to say.

At one end of the big barn, on a sort of raised platform, Major was already ensconced on his bed of straw, under a lantern which hung from a beam. He was twelve years old and had lately grown rather stout, but he was still a majestic-looking pig, with a wise and benevolent appearance in spite of the fact that his tushes had never been cut. Before long the other animals began to arrive and make themselves comfortable after their different fashions. First came the three dogs, Bluebell, Jessie and Pincher, and then the pigs, who settled down in the straw immediately in front of the platform. The hens perched

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